6. March 2026

What the Music Knows Before We Do

Or: A Meditation on Schoenberg, Tom McGah, and Whatever the Algorithm Just Served You

Originally published 27 February 2026 on Substack at https://michaelcelentana.substack.com

There was a professor at Berklee — this was the late '90s, which feels both like yesterday and like a different geological era of human civilization — named Tom McGah, and he said something in a music history class that I have never, in the intervening twenty-five-plus years, been able to fully put down. Not like a bad song that gets stuck in your head. More like a splinter that you stop noticing until one day you're doing something completely unrelated, washing dishes or sitting in traffic, and suddenly it's there again, pressing.

What he said was this: that in the years approaching the two World Wars, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century, something strange and unprecedented was happening in Western classical music. The tonal system — the scaffolding of harmony that had organized essentially all of European musical thought for roughly three hundred years — was coming apart. And not in the way things usually come apart, gradually and gracefully, the way fashions shift or idioms evolve. It was coming apart the way a fever comes on. Urgently. Uncomfortably. In ways that, to contemporary audiences, were not merely unconventional but actively upsetting.

Mahler's late symphonies. Schoenberg's move into atonality. Alban Berg. The Rite of Spring causing actual riots in Paris in 1913 — this is a fact that deserves to be sat with for a moment, because we live in an age when it is basically impossible to imagine music causing a riot. Not because people don't have strong feelings anymore, but because — and I'm getting ahead of myself, I'll circle back — music no longer seems to carry that kind of charge.

McGah's idea, the one that became the splinter, was that these composers were not simply being difficult or avant-garde for the sake of it. They were, in some sense that is hard to articulate without sounding mystical (and I'm going to try to articulate it anyway, at the risk of sounding mystical), feeling something. Something in the cultural atmosphere, in the zeitgeist — that overused word that happens to be exactly the right word — that had not yet made itself legible to ordinary consciousness. The music arrived before the headlines. The dissonance preceded the catastrophe. It was as though the artists, operating through some faculty that isn't quite reason and isn't quite intuition but is maybe what happens when those two things have been trained to work together for decades, could sense the shape of what was coming. The horror. The unraveling. The particular flavor of dread that would eventually have a name — the Holocaust, the Somme, the specific and industrial efficiency with which the twentieth century would set about destroying itself.

The music knew. And it sounded like it knew.

I want to be careful here, because this idea has a version of itself that is flattering to artists in a way that might not be entirely honest. There's a romanticism available — the Artist as Prophet, the Creative as Canary in the Cultural Coal Mine — that can curdle into something self-congratulatory and imprecise. Not every bleak or dissonant piece of music is a warning sign. Sometimes Schoenberg was just Schoenberg.

But I think McGah was pointing at something real. Not that individual artists are oracles, but that art — when it's functioning the way art can function at its best — is a kind of highly sensitive instrument for detecting pressures that haven't yet registered on the conventional gauges. Because art is made from the inside of human experience, from the texture of how it actually feels to be alive in a particular moment, and those feelings often know things that our analysis hasn't caught up to. The body knows before the mind. The dream knows before the daylight. And sometimes the music knows before the news.

Which is why I find myself, in recent years, sitting with a question that I'm genuinely uncertain how to answer. A question that started as a kind of idle curiosity and has become — I want to say, without being overly dramatic about it — something closer to a low-grade existential unease.

What is the pop music of this moment telling us?

Here's what I mean. Go listen to the most-streamed songs of any recent year. I'm not going to name specific tracks because by the time you read this they'll probably be different tracks but the phenomenon will be identical, and also because naming them feels a little like identifying suspects — which is not quite the spirit of the inquiry. But you know the songs I mean. You've heard them leaking from earbuds on the subway. You've heard them in the background of videos your nephew sent you. Maybe you've caught yourself absently humming them and then felt slightly disoriented about where you acquired them.

They're short. Startlingly short, many of them — structured around the understanding that a listener's attention is a resource being competed for, and that the competition is brutal, and that you have approximately eleven seconds before the thumb moves. They are produced with a precision that is genuinely impressive on a technical level, every frequency carefully managed, every beat aligned to something that the algorithmic machinery has determined will keep you from skipping. They often don't have traditional verses and choruses so much as a single hook repeated with minor variation, like a phrase being said louder rather than developed. They are, in the truest sense of a word we've mostly forgotten is an aesthetic judgment rather than simply a description, smooth. Frictionless. Optimized.

They do not, as a rule, disturb you.

And I keep thinking: what does that mean?

McGah's insight, translated into the present: if the music of the pre-war era was unconsciously encoding the dread and instability and coming-apart of that historical moment, what is music that sounds like this encoding about our moment?

One answer — the answer I find myself reaching for first and then pulling back from slightly — is that it's encoding a kind of numbing. That we live in a moment of such relentless, algorithmically-perfected stimulation that music has adapted not to cut through the noise but to become the noise. That what we're hearing in the smooth, dry, frictionless surface of contemporary pop is not an absence of feeling but a kind of protective coating over feeling. A sound that asks very little of you because you already have so much being asked of you by everything else.

There's something almost compassionate about that reading. The music is giving you a break.

But there's another reading. And this is the one that keeps me up, metaphorically speaking, at three in the morning when the dishes are done and the traffic has cleared.

What if the music isn't giving you a break? What if the music is — again, not through any individual artist's intention but through the aggregate, the ecosystem, the vast Darwinian machine of streaming and algorithms and attention economics — encoding something more like resignation? What if the three-minute perfectly-optimized hook-loop is the sonic shape of a civilization that has stopped expecting things to build toward something? That has made its peace, however uncomfortably, with the idea that depth is a luxury and development takes too long and the best you can do is find a groove that doesn't hurt and stay in it?

What if the flatness is the point?

I'm a guitar teacher. I've been teaching for over twenty-five years, and the central idea I keep returning to — the thing I try to give students alongside the chord shapes and the ear training and the theory — is that music is a language. That it is a system for saying things that cannot be said any other way. That it exists in time, which means it moves, which means it has the capacity to take you from one place to another place. To develop. To surprise you. To resolve what it raised, or to deliberately not resolve it, which is itself a kind of statement.

Music as language implies that music has something to say.

And I'm not sure — I want to be careful here, I'm genuinely not sure, rather than performing uncertainty as a rhetorical move — I'm not sure what the most-streamed music of this particular moment is saying. Or whether, in some important sense, it is saying anything at all, versus simply being — present, pleasant, undemanding, consumable, and gone.

Which might itself be a statement.

McGah never told us what to do with the idea. He presented it, the way good teachers present the most important things: as an open question, weighted with implication. He wasn't saying, as far as I could tell, that artists who sense the zeitgeist necessarily help anything. The composers who wrote the music that seemed to sense the approaching catastrophe of the World Wars did not prevent the catastrophe. Maybe you could even argue — and I'm not sure I'd make this argument but I can feel its outline — that the music and the catastrophe were two expressions of the same underlying pressure, not one predicting the other.

But they were saying something. The saying itself mattered, even if no one listened in time.

There's a thing that happens in jazz — in real jazz, the kind that made people uncomfortable when it was new and still makes people uncomfortable when they encounter it fresh — where the music will go somewhere you didn't expect, and your nervous system will briefly not know what to do with it, and then something resolves or transforms or opens up and you find yourself in a place you couldn't have arrived at any other way. That experience — of being taken somewhere by sound, of not quite knowing where you are, of the music outpacing your ability to anticipate it — is, I think, what music is capable of at its most powerful.

It is also, by design, what the algorithm has learned to filter out.

Because that moment of not knowing where you are is the moment you might skip.

And so we have built a machine that gives us only the music that never takes us anywhere we didn't already expect to go. And we have handed that machine the keys to what our culture sounds like. And I don't know — I genuinely don't know — what a future musicologist or a future Tom McGah is going to say about this, looking back. What they'll hear in it. What it will have turned out to have known.

I hope it's not what I sometimes think it might be.

But the music, as always, is already playing. The question is whether we're listening to what it's actually saying, or just to what we want to hear.

if this essay did something to you — cracked something open, confirmed a suspicion you'd had for years but never had words for, or simply made you feel less alone in your relationship with music — there's more where that came from. music as language is a publication about exactly what it sounds like: the idea that music isn't a metaphor for communication, it is communication, and that every person alive is already fluent in ways they haven't yet been told. new essays arrive when they're ready, which is to say: not on a schedule, but not randomly either — the way a good melody arrives. subscribe at michaelcelentana.substack.com and i'll meet you there.